“Blink” was an accidental gift from my friend Mark. He had ordered me a copy of Gladwell’s earlier book “The Tipping Point” right around the time “Blink” was published and the company sent the wrong book. [I am going to ignore the math that tells me in 2017 I took 12 years to read it.] “Blink” is about the instantaneous decisions we make, and and how often they are correct.
There are two business case studies, the first about New Coke. Back in the day Pepsi was gaining market share and “sip” testing was showing people preferred Pepsi. So the Coca-Cola company went into a panic and released a new flavor “New Coke” which we all remember was roundly rejected by the public. Later on they found that while Pepsi was winning “initial sip” tests, it wasn’t winning “drink the whole can” tests. Consumers initial reaction was misleading and Coke’s real problem turned out to be marketing rather than the product.
When Herman Miller crated the Aeron Chair it represented a radical departure from existing designs. Focus groups panned it, the only thing that saved the chair was that it was too far into production when the bad news started to cancel the product. If you’ve sat it one, its an awesome chair, and copied around the world. This example showed that focus groups tend to reject revolutionary products. [I think this says a lot to why established companies can’t innovate. Their processes are honed for evolutionary changes].
There are also some more of what I’ll call Gladwell-esque subjects. We get someone with a perceptive super-power and some studies that allegedly back up the claim. He presents a guy (Dr John Gottman) who allegedly can tell if a marriage is going to work out by observing a single minute of a couple discussing issues. He’s at the University of Washington and teaches classes to couples as of this day. I’m not saying Dr Gottman isn’t perceptive. I’m just saying that if he was as good as Mr Gladwell claims, we’d be requiring people to be interviewed by Gottman or his trained acolytes to get marriage licenses.
In another example a guy named Silvan Tomkins could tell all kinds of details about a person just by looking at some facial expressions. I won’t spoil the examples, but an example involving primitive tribes tripped my B.S. detector. Basically you have to accept people can learn lots from a single frame of video, which I cannot accept as being a reliable method.
One thread on police shootings led me to an interesting conclusion. He starts with a single anecdote about a unmarked car with four NYC cops who roll up on Amadou Diallo enjoying some night air in front of his home. They immediately make a series of bad decisions: they assume the guy is up to no good, that the fact he doesn’t run proves he’s a hardened thug, that his wallet is a gun, that one officer falling away from the wallet is shot. Basically the four of them gunned down this guy standing out on his porch. Mr Gladwell cites a study indicating that officers follow safety procedures less when they are in groups. Basically a lone officer is safer than a pair of officers. In groups they start skipping steps and are more likely to be confrontational. Gladwell doesn’t say it, but the data he presents implies that society would be safer if the police did not have guns.
Its an interesting book, but I’d take it with a grain of salt. Any time “experiments” are done in the Sociology world, we need to be wary of the test influencing the results.
